St Petersburg’s illustrious Sanskrit connections

Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg in the 19th century. Source: wikipedia

The Russian intelligentsia’s fascination with the ancient Indian language has existed for more than 200 years.

Although the raison d’être of St
Petersburg was to align Russia closer to Europe and the West, the city has a
distinguished tradition of Sanskrit scholarship with recorded information
dating back to the turn of the 18th to 19th century.

Gerasim Lebedev. Source: Embassy of India in Moscow

One of the pioneers of the study of
the ancient Indian language was Gerasim Lebedev who spent significant time in India in the 1780s. Tsar Alexander I was
so fascinated with Lebedev’s writing about India that he requested the scholar
and musician a Sanskrit printing press in the Russian Imperial capital. Lebedev
published a whole series of books, including translation of the poetry of
Bengali poet Bharatchandra Roy, a Russo-Hindustani dictionary and a book on the
grammar of Eastern dialects, but the famed Russian traveller was no Sanskrit
scholar.

Sanskrit scholarship in Russia began
under the aegis of Count Sergey Uvarov, an influential statesman and
educational curator. In 1818, Uvarov inaugurated the Asiatic Academy of St
Petersburg, where Sanskrit was taught for the first time with Russian being the
language of instruction. Tsarist Russia
initially relied on foreign professors to teach Sanskrit, with German academics
being the first to teach the ancient Indian language in the country.

Robert H. Stacy’s ‘India in Russian
Literature’ mentions Pavel Yakovlevich Petrov, a Sanskrit scholar who had a
particular fondness for Kashmir and translated the Hindu epic Ramayana into
Russian. Petrov learned Sanskrit in St Petersburg and taught the language in
the mid-19th century in Kazan and later in Moscow. He also
translated Kalhana’s Rajatrangini (The River of Kings), a chronicle of the
rulers of north-western India into Russian.

St Petersburg in the second part of
the 19th century even became one of the major research centres for
Sanskrit and attracted Indologists from all across Europe. Rudolf von Roth and
Otto von Bohtlingk, two c German scholars lived in the city and compiled a
seven-volume Sanskrit-German dictionary called Sanskrit Wörterbuch that was in
wide usage in academic circles in Germany. Von Bohtlingk was born in St Petersburg and learnt Sanskrit at the St
Petersburg State University. He is also well-known for translating an edition
of the Sanskrit grammar of Panini, who formulated formulation of the 3,959
rules of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics in the grammar known as
Ashtadhyayi.

Indologist Ivan P. Minayev. Source: wikipedia

Arguably the most famous Sanskrit
professor from Russia in the 19th century was Ivan Minayev, who also
taught comparative grammar of Indo­European languages. He travelled to India
and Ceylon in 1874-75 and wrote extensively about the countries.

“His excellent command over Pali and
Sanskrit, as well as the knowledge of many contemporary Indian languages and
some Pahari dialects, allowed him to communicate freely with various strata of
people in India living in the regions and territories which he travelled across,”
Irina Chelysheva wrote in article for RIR in 2010. She added that Minayev collected and accumulated unique historical
data, “which he subsequently commented upon in the notes of his journeys to
India, Nepal and Ceylon in 1874-75, to India in 1880 and to India and Burma in
1885-86.”

The State Library of the St Petersburg has
preserved the Sanskrit and Pali manuscripts that Minayev collected in India,
while his art collection can be seen in the museum
of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg.

“The keen interest of I.P. Minayev
towards the culture and everyday life of the peoples of India found expression
in the study of folklore and ethnography, as important as everything else that
this scientist-achiever did,” said Madhu Malik, who translated ‘Indian Fairy Tales and Legends, collected in Kumaon
in 1875.’ Minayev’s trips to India resulted also in interesting ethnographic
collections, preserved in the N.N. Miklukho-Maklay Museum of Anthropology and
Ethnography.

Yet another St Petersburg-based
Indologist who made a great contribution to Sanskrit and Indian studies before
the Bolshevik Revolution was Fyodor Stcherbatskoy, best known as an authority on
Buddhist texts. Stcherbatskoy was a
student of Minayev and worked on a theory of Indian poetry and published the Theory
of Knowledge and Logic in the Doctrines of Later Buddhism in Russian in two
editions. He later taught Sanskrit till his death in 1942. Stcherbatskoy’s
scholarship of Hindu philosophy and Buddhism even won him the admiration of
Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore.

The interest and passion for Sanskrit
and Indian philosophies that was generated by Russian Indologists spread across
to various areas of Russian cultural life. Konstantin Stanislavsky incorporated
several yogic exercises and psychological techniques into his Stanislavsky
System to developing attention and concentration, and also for achieving
‘Solitude in Public’ on stage.

Post-Second World War, a new
generation of scholars began to pursue Indology and India’s warm relations with
the USSR gave these scholars access to many places and older texts. The newer
generation of Indologists however followed a path that was laid out by the
great scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries from St
Petersburg.